Just across the border
from California's Bigfoot country the Canadians have their own Abominable
Snowmen  the Sasquatch. Indians have been warning us about them for
centuries  and finally we're starting to listen.

Following his now-famous report on America's Abominable Snowman (TRUE
December 1959) author Sanderson went up to British Columbia to personal
investigate the centuries-old stories of the Sasquatch. Instead of old
legends, he found a story as current as tomorrow's headlines. Sanderson
is, in addition to being a highly respected research scientist, a zoologist,
explorer, animal collector and author of numerous books and articles.
As one of the foremost experts in the field of obscure animals, his report
on Canada's "Snowman" is of particular interest.

BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

On a sunny October day in 1955 a young man named William Roe decided
to take a day off from his work on a road-building crew and go hunting.
What he did on that day, and most particularly what he saw, electrified
everyone who heard of it. For Roe came face-to-face with one of the huge,
hairy human-like creatures which American's know as Bigfoot and which
Canadians call the Sasquatch. Stories about Canada's version of the Abominable
Snowman are almost as old as the country itself, but Roe's account was
so detailed and convincing that it could not be laughed off by the cynics
who cannot accept anything they do not understand. And form the day it
became known, the Sasquatch began emerging from the misty land of legend
into the cold light of the twentieth century. Roe's account of his remarkable
experience is a matter of public record. He has described it in his own
words and has made a sworn statement as to its authenticity before a public
solicitor. Before letting him tell his story, there are two things I would
like to make clear. First, Roe is a man who has spent most of his life
in the outdoors, he is a veteran hunter, and when he sees a bear he does
not get hysterical and think it is something else. Second, while "sworn
statements" may not cut too much ice in this country, they mean a
great deal in Canada and other parts of the British Empire.

Canadians have an intense respect for the Law, and their laws are quite
a lot more stringent than ours. If you make a sworn statement to legal
authority in the presence of witnesses you sign your honor to it. If you
lie, you are held responsible. If it is proved for any reason later that
you lied, you have committed perjury and you are liable for whatever injuries
your lies may have caused. A Canadian thinks more than twice before he
goes before a justice of the peace and makes a sworn
statement. So, with the kind permission of Mr. Roe himself and of John
Green of the Agassiz-Harrison Advance, who persuaded Roe to make
his experience known, I give you the formers statement verbatim. It reads:

Affidavit

I, W. Roe of the City of Edmonton, in the province of Alberta make
oath and say,(1) That the exhibit A attached to this, my affidavit,
is absolutely true and correct in all details.
Sworn before me in the City of Edmonton, Province of Alberta, this 26th
day of August, A.D. 1957.
(Signed) William Roe
(Signed) by W.H. Clark
Assistant Claims Agent
Number D.D. 2822

EXHIBIT A.

"Ever since I was a small boy back in the forest of Michigan,
I have studied the lives and habits of wild animals. Later, when I supported
my family in Northern Alberta by hunting and trapping, I spent many
hours just observing the wild things. They fascinated me. But the most
incredible experience I ever had with a wild creature occurred near
a little town called Tete Jaune Cache, British Columbia, about eighty
miles west of Jasper, Alberta. I had been working on the highway near
Tete Jaune Cache for about two years. In October 1955, I decided to
climb five miles up Mica Mountain to an old deserted mine, just for
something to do. I came in sight of the mine about three o'clock in
the afternoon after an easy climb. I had just come out of a patch of
low brush into a clearing when I saw what I thought was a grizzly bear,
in the bush on the other side. I had shot a grizzly near that spot the
year before. This one was only about 75 yards away, but I didn't want
to shoot it, for I had no way of getting it out. So I sat down on a
small rock and watched my rifle in my hands. I could see part of the
animal's head and the top of one shoulder. A moment later it raised
up and stepped out into the opening. Then I saw it was not a bear. This,
to the best of my recollection, is what the creature looked like and
how it acted as it came across the clearing directly toward me. My first
impression was of a huge man, about six feet tall, almost three feet
wide, and probably weighing somewhere near three hundred pounds. It
was covered from head to foot with dark brown silver-tipped hair. But
as it came closer I saw by its breasts that it was female. And yet,
its torso was not curved like a female's. Its broad frame was straight
from shoulder to hip. Its arms were much thicker than a man's arms,
and longer, reaching almost to its knees. Its feet were broader proportionately
than a man's, about five inches wide at the front and tapering to much
thinner heels. When it walked it placed the heel of its foot down first,
and I could see the grey-brown skin or hide on the soles of its feet.
It came to the edge of the bush I was hiding in, within twenty feet
of me, and squatted down on its haunches. Reaching out its hands it
pulled the branches of bushes toward it and stripped the leaves with
its teeth. Its lips curled flexibly around the leaves as it ate. I was
close enough to see that its teeth were white and even. The shape of
this creature's head somewhat resembled a Negro's. The head was higher
at the back than at the front. The nose was broad and flat. The lips
and chin protruded farther than its nose. But the hair that covered
it, leaving bare only the parts of its face around the mouth, nose and
ears, made it resemble an animal as much as a human. None of this hair,
even on the back of its head, was longer than an inch, and that on its
face was much shorter. Its ears were shaped like a human's ears. But
its eyes were small and black like a bear's. And its neck also was unhuman.
Thicker and shorter than any man's I had ever seen.

As I watched this creature, I wondered if some movie company was making
a film at this place and that what I saw was an actor, made up to look
partly human and partly animal. But as I observed it more, I decided
it would be impossible to fake such a specimen. Anyway, I learned later
there was no such company near that area. Nor, in fact, did anyone live
up Mica Mountain, according to the people who lived in Tete Jaune Cache.

Finally the wild thing must have got my scent, for it looked directly
at me through an opening in the brush. A look of amazement crossed its
face. It looked so comical at the moment I had to grin. Still in a crouched
position, it backed up three or four short steps, then straightened
up to its full height and started to walk rapidly back the way it had
come. For a moment it watched me over its shoulder as it went, not exactly
afraid, but as though it wanted no contact with anything strange. The
thought came to me that if I shot it, I would possibly have a specimen
of great interest to scientists the world over. I had heard stories
of the Sasquatch, the giant hairy Indians that live in the legends of
British Columbia Indians, and also many claim, are still in fact alive
today. Maybe this was a Sasquatch, I told myself. I leveled my rifle.
The creature was still walking rapidly away, again turning its head
to look in my direction. I lowered the rifle. Although I have called
the creature "it", I felt now that it was a human being and
I knew I would never forgive myself if I killed it. Just as it came
to the other patch of brush it threw its head back and made a peculiar
noise that seemed to be half laugh and half language, and which I can
only describe as a kind of a whinny. Then it walked from the small brush
into a stand of lodgepole pine. I stepped out into the opening and looked
across a small ridge just beyond the pine to see if I could see it again.
It came out on the ridge a couple of hundred yards away from me, tipped
its head back again, and again emitted the only sound I had heard it
make, but what this half-laugh, half-language was meant to convey, I
do not know. It disappeared then, and I never saw it again. I wanted
to find out if it lived on vegetation entirely or ate meat as well,
so I went down and looked for signs. I found it in five different places,
and although I examined it thoroughly, could find no hair or shells
of bugs or insects. So Z believe it was strictly a vegetarian. I found
one place where it had slept for a couple of nights under a tree. Now,
the nights were cool up the mountain, at this time of year especially,
and yet it had not used a fire. I found no sign that it possessed even
the simplest of tools. Nor a single companion while in this place. Whether
this was a Sasquatch I do not know. It will always remain a mystery
to me, unless another one is found. I hereby declare the above statement
to be in every part true, to the best of my powers of observation and
recollection.

(Signed) William Roe"

Stories about the Sasquatch have been appearing in print from time to time
since the 1860's, and I have clipping in my files from almost every year
since the early 1920's. But the modern history of the Sasquatch really dates
from September, 1941, when one of these creatures paid a visit  in
broad daylight  to an Indian family named Chapman. While the Amerindian
stories have usually been dismissed as legend, or laughed off because Indians
are not supposed to be reliable, this experience was accompanied by too
much physical evidence to be ignored. The Chapman family consisted off George
and Jeannie Chapman and children numbering, at my visit, four. Mr. Chapman
worked on the railroad, and was living at that time in a small place called
Ruby Creek, 30 miles up the Fraser River from Agassiv, British Columbia,
in Canada's great western province.

It was about 3 in the afternoon of a sunny, cloudless day when Jeannie
Chapman's eldest son, then aged 9, came running to the house saying that
there was a cow coming down out of the woods at the foot of the nearby
mountain. The other kids, a boy aged 7 and a little girl of 5, were still
playing in a field behind the house bordering on the rail track. Mrs.
Chapman went out to look, since the boy seemed oddly disturbed, and they
saw what at first she thought was a very big bear moving about among the
bushes bordering the field beyond the railway tracks. She called the two
children who came running immediately. Then the creature moved onto the
tracks and she saw to her horror that it was a gigantic man covered with
hair, not fur. The hair seemed to be about four inches long all over,
and of a pale yellow-brown color. To pin down this color Mrs. Chapman
pointed out to me a sheet of lightly varnished plywood in the room where
we were sitting. This was of a brown-ochre color. This creature advanced
directly toward the house and Mrs. Chapman had, as she put it, "much
too much time to look at it" because she stood her ground outside
while the eldest boy  on her instructions  got a blanket from
the house and rounded up the other children. The kids were in a near panic,
she told us, and it took two or three minutes to get the blanket, during
which time the creature had reached the near corner of the field only
about 100 feet away from her. Mrs. Chapman then spread the blanket and,
holding it aloft so that the kids could not see the creature or it them,
she backed off at the double to the old field and down on to the river
beach out of sight, and then ran with the kids downstream to the village.

I asked her a leading question about the blanket. Had her purpose in
using it been to prevent her kids seeing the creature, in accord with
an alleged Amerindian belief that to do so brings bad luck and often death?
Her reply was both prompt and surprising. She said that, although she
had heard white men tell of that belief, she had not heard it from her
parents or any other of her people whose advice regarding the so-called
Sasquatch had been simply not to go further than certain points up certain
valleys, to run if she saw one, nut not to struggle if one caught her
as it might squeeze her to death by mistake. "No," she said,
"I used the blanket because I thought it was after one of the kids
and so might go into the house to look for them instead of following me." This seems to have been sound logic as the creature did go into the house
and also rummaged through an old outhouse pretty thoroughly, hauling from
it a 55-gallon barrel of salt fish, breaking this open, and scattering
its contents about outside. (The irony of it is that all those three children
DID die within three years; the two boys by drowning, and the little girl
on a sickbed. And just after I interviewed the Chapmans they also were
drowned in the Fraser River when a rowboat capsized.) Mrs. Chapman told
me that the creature was about 7 1/2 feet tall. She could estimate its
height by the various fence and line posts standing about the field. It
had a rather small head and a very short, thick neck; in fact really no
neck at all, a point that was emphasized by William Roe and by all others
who claim to have seen one of these creatures. Its body was entirely human
in shape except that it was immensely thick through its chest and its
arms were exceptionally long. She did not see the feet which were in the
grass. Its shoulders were very wide and it had no breasts, from which
Mrs. Chapman assumed it was a male, though she also did not see any male
genitalia due to the long hair covering its groin. She was most definite
on one point: the naked parts of its face and its hands were much darker
than its hair, and appeared to be almost black.

George Chapman returned home from his work on the railroad that day shortly
before 6 in the evening and by a route that by-passed the village so that
he saw no one to tell him what had happened. When he reached his house
he immediately saw the woodshed door battered in, and spotted enormous
humanoid footprints all over the place. Greatly alarmed  for he,
like all of his people, had heard since childhood about the "big
wild men of the mountains," though he did not hear the word Sasquatch
till after this incident  he called for his family and then dashed
through the house. Then he spotted the foot-tracks of his wife and kids
going off toward the river. He followed these until he picked them up
on the sand beside the river and saw them going off downstream without
any giant ones following.

Somewhat relieved, he was retracing his steps when he stumbled across
the giant's foot-tracks on the river bank farther upstream. These had
come down out of the potato patch, which lay between the house and the
river, had milled about by the river, and then gone back through the old
field toward the foot of the mountains where they disappeared in the heavy
growth.

Returning to the house relieved to know that the tracks of all four of
his family had gone off downstream to the village, George Chapman went
to examine the woodshed. In our interview, after 18 years, he still expressed
voluble astonishment that any living thing, even a 7-foot-6-inch man with
a barrel-chest could lift a 55-gallon tub of fish and break it open without
using a tool. He confirmed the creature's height after finding a number
of long brown hairs stuck in the slabwood lintel of the doorway, above
the level of his head.

George Chapman then went off to the village to look for his family, and
found them in a state of calm collapse. He gathered them up and invited
his father-in-law and two others to return with him, for protection of
his family when he was away at work. The foot-tracks returned every night
for a week and on two occasions the dogs that the Chapmans had taken with
them set up the most awful racket at exactly 2 o'clock in the morning.
The Sasquatch did not, however, molest them or, apparently, touch either
the house or the woodshed. But the whole business was too unnerving and
the family finally moved out. They never went back. After a long chat
about this and other matters, Mrs. Chapman suddenly told us something
very significant just as we were leaving. She said: "It made an awful
funny noise." I asked her if she could imitate this noise for me
but it was her husband who did so, saying that he had heard it at night
twice during the week after the first incident. He then proceeded to utter
exactly the same strange, gurgling whistle that the men in California,
who said they had heard a Bigfoot call, had given us. This is a sound
I cannot reproduce in print, but I can assure you that it is unlike anything
I have ever heard given by man or beast anywhere in the world. To me,
this information is of the greatest significance. That an Amerindian couple
in British Columbia should give out with exactly the same strange sound
in connection with a Sasquatch that two highly educated white men did,
over 600 miles south in connection with California's Bigfoot, is incredible.
If this is all hoax or a publicity stunt, or mass-hallucination, as some
people have claimed, how does it happen that this noise  which defies
description  always sounds the same no matter who has tried to reproduce
it for me? These were probably the last words on the Sasquatch that the
Chapmans uttered and I absolutely refuse to listen to anybody who might
say they were lying. Admittedly, honest men are such a rarity as possibly
to be non-existent, but I have met a few who could qualify and I put the
Chapmans near the head of the list.

What on earth had they to gain by making up such a story? All they had
ever gotten in return was ridicule and insults to their ancient race.
And we had just walked up to them unannounced on a railroad track and
they did not tell us what we "wanted to know," because we never
said exactly what that was. And, besides, there were plenty of white men
who went and looked at those tracks at that time, and they weren't all
in cahoots and involved in some devilish plot to defraud the public. The
experience of the Chapman family kicked the lid off a fairly large pot
that had been brewing for a long time. A Mr. John W. Burns, now of San
Francisco, had for many years been collecting every scrap of information
on this subject and had published a number of articles on it. Actually,
it was he who had bestowed the name Sasquatch on what the Amerindians
had previously called, in their various languages and dialects, merely
"Wild Men of the Mountains." Mr. Burns was a schoolteacher and
had been an Indian Agent, and he is a man of much erudition. There was
a long and rather full tradition about the Sasquatch in British Columbia,
and especially on Vancouver Island, where so many sightings have been
reported. Vancouver Island is enormous. It is very rugged, clothed in
the densest forest, and is, even today, for the most part unexplored.
What is more, it was the first part of the Northwest Pacific Rain Forest
to be invaded by roads, and thus first of these unexplored regions where
sightings could have been made. Getting back to the various accounts,
I would like to emphasize again that they show a remarkable continuity
and similarity that goes beyond the possibilities of coincidence. And
you must bear in mind that the widely assorted people who saw a Sasquatch
did not know what had been reported before; in fact, a great many of them
were completely unaware that any such thing had ever been seen anywhere
in the world. Why and how should responsible, sensible men like William
Roe make up all these details, details which so exactly coincide with
little incidental items recorded by Sherpas in Nepal, bulldozer operators
in California, Amerindians on Vancouver Island, teenagers going home from
a dance in Agassiz, and so forth? What, I ask the skeptics, is the idea?
Is there some sort of international plot and. if so, why do the plotters
persist in getting unknown people in obscure places to give out incredible
statements?

Let me close with one final Sasquatch sighting, as this was the one
which first made news throughout the world. It happened in 1956 when a
Mr. Stanley Hunt of Vernon, British Columbia  a man who had not
previously been in anyway interested in this matter, nor in fact, had
even heard of it outside of some joking references in local newspapers
 was driving through the small township of Flood on the Fraser River.
Shortly after dark he saw a large humanoid clothed in "gray hair"
cross the road while another similar creature "gangly, not stocky
like bear stood in the bush beside the road." Flood is immediately
adjacent to Ruby Creek. So we are right back where we started. The matter
of Bigfoot in California is, at the moment of writing, a very live issue,
and several people are putting a good deal of money into an extensive
investigation. But the Sasquatch is no less important. This creature has
been told about by the Amerindians for centuries, and allegedly seen by
white men for more than a century, and it is still being encountered today.
Are we just going to let this thing slip through our fingers by sitting
back and laughing it off? Here is something profoundly alive in our very
midst that certainly needs proper and intelligent study, and some serious
effort expended upon it. And it is a matter that might produce one of
the greatest scientific discoveries of our time.